SoulNothing 0 Posted March 31, 2004 before i start i just want to say please do not bash me for this i was not bragging when i said bout my self destructive methods more joke and warning because i try to mess things up and fix them to learn with that said on to the issue last night i booted fedora and also to clarify boot it ng was not on my hard drive at that time i installed fedora to try to upgrade the kernel and then see if i could get it to work no avail i hit boot black screen restart no operating system im like fine ill start all over i thought all my music and stuff would be intact but it didnt i put xp boot disc in first thought try repairing the old one didnt work all right re install over the old files without formatting the drive told it to install on my 60 gig ntfs which was in the primary position at all times on the mbr and delete all old windows after dealing with it for an hour it finally installed it rebooted thought everything would be fine windwos xp cannot function with safe boot all right you may be wondering by now what this has to do with linux in short it killed and i want to know where my linux stuff continuing i keep a spare raw 20 gig unpartitioned sector on my drive install it there and just there format that drive as ntfs for some reason this in itself took an hour and i found out why later when i finally got into windows anywho as stated an hour later restrart got ready to reinstall as known install is quite boring avoid that boot into windows dont pay attention to my computer or nothing just install all my drivers restart go into my computer this is where it got me 25 gig fedora 1.90 now morphed into a 50 gig has windows and just windows totally locked 25 gig fedora 1 morphed into the 50 gig 2 gig swap morphed 2 gig ntfs 60 gig broken into a 10 and 2 25 gigs so now it looks like this 25 gig locked 25 gig wasnt locked 10 gig locked 2 gig locked 50 gig locked every single one contains windows took some work to see that my old setup was like that 25 gig fedora 1.0 25 gig fedora 1.90 2 gig 60 gig xp which broke because i tried to boot in safe all right to put this lightly im posting this here also because everyone i know here is real helpful and nice also if i may seem rambling in some areas and incoherrent i will say i have some things going on right now and i cant really think straight but i think it has something to do with my old partition scheme to restate again the 2nd profile is the older setup the 1st profile is the current one i just cant think this through right now but i listed as much detail on the install as possible to show you how this may have happend thank you in advance Soul nothing Share this post Link to post
danleff 0 Posted April 1, 2004 I like the title of your post, which is actually accurate in your case. Once you try to recover Windows, or re-install it, the Master Boot record gets written over. What this means is that lilo or grub is essentually wiped from the MBR. To complicate matters, if the partition scheme gets changed for some reason in the process, boot.ini, the windows boot loader, may get confused. How I recovered from this once, was to use the installation cd, in your case fedora, to recover lilo or grub, whichever bootloader that you were using. Windows will not read your linux partitions, so My Computer does not see them. If you do have a functional windows install now, and you have PartitionMagic, you can look at the partition scheme and see what you have, then use the Fedora cd, hopefully, to recover lilo or Grub. If you don't have PartitionMagic, grab the latest version of Mepis or Knoppix and use qtparted to look at the partition scheme. Write down what they are. If you can tell which ext3 or whatever is root, then you can try to recover. Now, I can't remember which way Fedora does this off hand, but once you know where root is for Fedora, you should be able to add a modifier when the cd boots, to get into your Fedora install (the most recent one) and see if it will recover. Usually this requires that you add the modifier at the boot screen prompt, like linux root=/dev/hda3, or whatever the root of Fedora is. It looks like you did a fresh install of the most recent Fedora, so you would want to try it with that cd and the proper root designation of Fedora 1.90, or whatever it is. This hopefully will allow you to recover both Fedora installs in Lilo or Grub, and also, hopefully allow Windows to be an option as well. Now if the windows partition designation has changed, you may need to alter Grub or Lilo to point it in the right direction. Again, if you are lucky, you will get more than one choice for windows, and use the right one to get into windows. Just remember, windows likes to be on the first partition of the drive, so this can be a little tricky, if you re-installed on other than the first partition of the drive. If you can figure out or know where everything is, we can help walk you though it, with the proper methods, maybe. Share this post Link to post
Mel 0 Posted April 1, 2004 I've been playing with Fedora 2 (1.9) for about a week now. There are warnings in the docs that it is not fit for daily use. The warning should come up when you boot the install disk. The Fedora 1.9 installer thinks windows partition tables are corrupt and tries to 'fix' them. That effectively destroys windows partitions. When you reload XP,XP thinks the linux partitions are corrupt and reformats them for windows.Fedora 2 will destroy windows even when installed in another HD in the same computer. If you want the new kernel ,Mandrake 10 uses it and,as far as I can tell so far is pretty stable.It also has very good drivers for HP periphals. Especially the all-in-ones. Oh,yeah,Fedora 1.9 seems to be ok if you give it the whole HD.(Kinda like XP.) Putting XP and Fedora 1.9 on the same drive is like trying to get two hardheaded five year olds to share a toy. Share this post Link to post
SoulNothing 0 Posted April 2, 2004 i thought i shoulda changed the thread title after tosting i put on boot it ng but that cleared it someone up i wiped all but two but something is still up with windows now i got two partitions and the program files are all over the place how exactly do you check the md5 sum because i want to give mandrake a shot thanks Share this post Link to post
danleff 0 Posted April 2, 2004 Since you are using Windows presently, try the following app.; http://winmd5sum.solidblue.biz/ Share this post Link to post
SoulNothing 0 Posted April 3, 2004 Thanks danleff you have been a real help since i signed up i gotta thank everyone here thanks for everything Share this post Link to post